I didn't even know rush lowered your defence. Oh, and I sort of never changed formations after the second level, since it didn't seem to matter. But, yeah, I get that the higher difficulty makes the game very different.

Basically, the magic animation part was the point I was mostly trying to make. Why couldn't they just let you skip the damn animations? I played the game on an emulator, and for some abilities I'd get mean slowdowns.

Totally agreed, I just felt bad for sort of derailing the thread.